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7 Demand Generation Pitfalls to Dodge in 2023

Demand generation is a vital marketing process, but it can be challenging. Marketers prioritize improving conversion rates, focusing on lead quality, and implementing personalized strategies. Common pitfalls include disorganized marketing data, lack of audience knowledge, neglecting lead scoring, overlooking content marketing, not offering free incentives, failing to measure strategic metrics, and spreading resources too thin. By addressing these pitfalls, marketers can optimize their demand generation efforts and achieve better outcomes.

Introduction

Demand generation is a complex and vital marketing process. According to 86% of marketers, demand generation is their main priority today.
Demand generation is not a constant metric. It keeps on evolving and changing with every passing year. Based on the DGR Benchmark Survey 2021, the demand generation landscape looks like this:
  • Improving conversion rate and campaign performance is right now the main focus point.
  • Marketers are focusing more on lead quality over quantity.
  • Driving better pipeline strategies to support increased segmentation has moved up the priority ladder.
  • Personalization, budget allocation, and marketing performance metrics evaluation are now taking time for demand-generating marketers.
Since demand generation is becoming complex day-by-day; thus, marketers can easily fall into many pitfalls and ruin all their marketing efforts.
But there is no need to panic! Because we have evaluated 7 common demand generation pitfalls along with methods to dodge them. So, let’s get started.

7 Common Demand Generation Pitfalls

Demand generation revolves around multiple marketing channels, customer segmentation, and data collection methods. Therefore, there are several points where demand generation marketers can make mistakes. So, to make demand generation pitfalls less daunting, watch out for these pitfalls today:

Pitfall #1.  Not Organizing Marketing Data

Modern marketing strategies heavily rely upon data. Whether you have to plan a marketing campaign or create a sales funnel, you need data to move up.
In the last few years, many brands have focused on collecting first-hand buyer’s intent data using different lead generation and nurturing campaigns. But unfortunately, not many of them have made a plan to organize the database.
So, the biggest demand generation pitfall is that brands have data, but they are not fully leveraging it. They don’t know how to manage high-quality data.
According to Gartner, 60% of brands don’t measure up the annual financial cost of poor-quality data. These businesses are losing money on poor data management.
The simple solution to dodge this demand generation pitfall is to manage your customer data effectively. Here’s how you can do it:
  • Appoint a chief data officer in your organization to monitor the quality of data.
  • Use automatic solutions like CRM to streamline your customer data.
  • Constantly monitor your data quality.

Pitfall #2. Not Knowing Your Audience

Today, the worst demand generation pitfall is not knowing your audience. It is like a dead-end for your marketing efforts.
When you don’t know who you target, you cannot create a personalized marketing campaign and generate the desired demand. So, once you organize your customer data, segment it to find who your potential customers are.
It is admitted by over 26% of marketers that not knowing and segmenting their audience has wasted their marketing budget.
Now, it is not a simple thing to understand your audience base and then segment them into separate groups. It takes experience and time to sort your priorities
However, you can start knowing your audience by tracking their behavior on your website and interaction with your content. For instance:
  • Which web page generates higher traffic?
  • Where are your leads present on your sales funnel?
  • How often do people click on social pricing pages? Etc.
Once again, you need the right analytics tools to observe your audience’s behavior. Nowadays, you can find many great analytic tools, such as Google Analytics, MonsterInsights, etc.

Pitfall #3. Not Using a Lead Scoring Approach

Not every lead that walks your way is ready to convert. Many leads require further nurturing before they can move up in your sales funnel.
In contrast, there are some leads that are already vetted and ready to become your customers. But, the main question is, how will you know which lead is ready and which is not?
The answer is lead scoring. But what’s that?
Well, if you don’t know what lead scoring is, this is a demand generation pitfall for you.
Lead score is a simple method of giving a score to every lead. This will help you understand which leads are more ready to convert. Further, it will help you design personalized marketing campaigns based on the lead’s score.
To score your leads, you have to decide parameters for scoring too. For example, if a lead visits a pricing page on your website, they will likely be more ready to purchase, so you can score it higher than the lead that has visited your home page.

Pitfall #4. Not Using Demand Generating Content Marketing Strategy

Today, almost every buyer’s journey starts with an online search. For example, 73% of industrial manufacturing buyers use Google to search before buying anything.
Source : thinkwithgoogle
As you already know, content is the only way to appear in top search results today. Thus, you need to put a demand-generating content marketing strategy in order.
Yes, you can’t simply publish anything on your website and expect people to buy it. You have to come up with a proper content marketing plan to spike demand. Otherwise, a giant pitfall is already dug for you.
Now, you don’t need to worry. Here are a few easy methods to create demand generating content:
  • Trigger fear of missing out with your content like limited deals, special giveaways, etc.
  • Incorporate user-generated content in your content marketing strategy.
  • Partner with other content creators and bloggers to reach more people.
  • Understand your audience’s pinpoint and trigger it with your content, like creating the ultimate e-book or podcasts.
  • Produce something exclusively for your subscribers, like locked content.

Pitfall #5. Not Offering Free Stuff

Demand generation is like a honey-making process. You need to first gather bees, a.k.a. your potential customers, in lieu of selling/producing honey.
And for that, you have to provide some lucrative offers to attract your potential audience. You need to offer free stuff to engage your audience.
It is found that free users are 10% to 50% more likely to become your regular paying customers. So, based on your customers’ data, you need to provide a free offer or demo to them.
This demand generation method is often used by SaaS companies to promote their products. For example, Grammarly is a popular grammar and spelling checker tool for businesses.
Source : grammarly
It has a full free version where users can check basic grammatical errors. But, it will only let users check advanced grammatical errors once they upgrade to premium membership. This helps to trigger FOMO among users that they are missing on advanced features, which can motivate them to upgrade.

Pitfall #6. Not Measuring Strategic Metrics

Another common demand generation pitfall that you should avoid is not using a strategic approach to measure marketing metrics. Monitoring strategy metrics is important if you want to know whether your demand generation campaigns are actually working.
By evaluating the right marketing metrics, you can better achieve your goals and generate higher demand in the market.
According to a Google and MIT study, 89% of marketers use revenue, market share, or CLV to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Source : Think with google
But you need to take a step ahead to achieve maximum results from your demand generation campaigns, such as:
  • Cost per acquisition knows how much you need to spend to acquire new customers. It can vary from campaign to campaign.
  • Cost per lead is every dollar that you have to spend on different marketing channels to bring leads into your marketing funnel.
  • Customer lifetime value is the amount spent on nurturing a lead.
  • Click-through rate is the number of times your ads or website clicked compared to impressions it has generated.
  • Bounce rate is the number of users who visited your website but immediately left without taking any action.
  • Lead-to-customer conversion rate to know how many leads your marketing campaigns generated.
  • Engage time to know how long a person has interacted with your website. The higher engagement time means a person is more interested in your products or services.
  • You should also check the quality of your inbound links because search engines pay attention to every link that is attached to your website.
Overall, you should track the metrics that can help you achieve your demand generation goals. So, to avoid falling into the demand generation pitfall, keep on monitoring the right performance metrics.

Pitfall #7. Focusing on Too Many Things

Digital marketing is a big umbrella term. Multiple marketing channels and methods are present in the digital dynamics, such as content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and so on.
Therefore, you cannot simultaneously focus on all the digital marketing to generate demand. Doing this will only fall you into a pitfall.
However, if you have a dedicated marketing team, you can try different marketing approaches. But still, it is better to channel your resources on high converting marketing strategies.
Suppose social media marketing is generating more leads for your business compared to video marketing. In that case, you should dedicate your resources to improving your social media marketing efforts rather than wasting them on video marketing.
Thus, constantly monitoring your marketing campaigns will help you understand where more leads are coming from.
So, the best strategy to avoid demand generation pitfalls is to try different marketing methods, monitor their progress, and only focus on the high generating channels.

Let’s Dodge Demand Generation Pitfalls Now!

Demand generation is the fundamental step towards capturing and nurturing leads. Therefore, you have to be very careful while generating demand.
Falling into demand generation pitfalls can set you back and ruin all your marketing efforts. You can lose potential leads, waste marketing budget, and damage your company’s reputation by making mistakes in the demand generation process.
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Gaurav Roy

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